Victor Davis Hanson Quotes

Entertainers wrongly assume that their fame, money, and influence arise from broad knowledge rather than natural talent, looks, or mastery of a narrow skill.

Behind every American soldier, dozens of their countrymen tonight sleep soundly — and hundreds more in their shadow abroad will wake up alive and safe.

Globalization has enriched the planet beyond belief, leading to ever-increased demands of perfection. And thanks to 24/7 communications, we all instantaneously know when these expectations aren't met.

Evil is ancient, unchanging, and with us always. The more postmodern the West becomes — affluent, leisured, nursed on moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multicultural relativism — the more premodern the evil among us seems to arise in nihilistic response.

Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether.

if Westerners deem themselves too smart, too moral, or too soft to stop aggressors in this complex nuclear age, then—as Socrates and Aristotle alike remind us—they can indeed become real accomplices to evil through inaction.

human character is unchanging and thus its conduct in calamitous times is always predictable.

But wars—or the threat of war—at least put an end to American chattel slavery, Nazism, Fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism. It is hard to think of any democracy—Afghan, American, Athenian, contemporary German, Iraqi, Italian, Japanese, ancient Theban—that was not an outcome of armed struggle and war.

Often the white elite signaled their disgust of the “white privilege” of the disintegrating middle class as a means of exempting their own quite genuine white privilege of insider contacts, professional degrees, wealth, inheritance, and influence.

The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgement that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for the poor to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it. (p.272)

In some sense, winning against impossible odds—when most others cannot or would not try—is the only mark of a great general.

Again, wars do not really end until the conditions that started them--a bellicose government, an aggressive leader, a national policy of brinksmanship--are eliminated. Otherwise, there remains a bellum interruptum, much like the so-called Peace of Nicias, when Athens and Sparta agreed to a time-out in 421 B.C., before going at each other with renewed and deadly fury in 415 B.C.

General George Patton and others lamented that the Second World War had broken out in 1939 over saving the free peoples of Eastern Europe from totalitarianism—only to end, through the broken 1945 Yalta accords, ensuring their enslavement by an erstwhile Soviet ally whose military we had supplied lavishly.

The United States is often criticized as interventionist, but in fact America’s traditional propensity has been more isolationist—willing to act forcefully in the world when absolutely necessary, but preferring to be unencumbered.

Barack Obama, for at least the first two years after his departure, had all but destroyed the traditional role of Democrats as a federal, state, and local majority party—and in its place had paved the way for a new neosocialist ascendency.

In Trump’s mind, the problem with federal agencies was not just that they overreached and were weaponized, but that their folds of bureaucracy led to incompetency.

Prewar education, reputation, influence, and rank matter little when the enemy is gaining ground and very few know how to turn him back.

General George S. Patton may have been uncouth, but he wasn’t wrong when he bellowed, “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.

Japan would live and die by the race card—defining (and demonizing) America as “white” and thus Japan as a kindred but clearly superior “yellow” people.

Democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war—and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever.

Saving the world is a much more ambitious, ennobling, and ego-gratifying project than preserving the neighborhood.

tragedy, comedy, and the Parthenon were not so much expressions of native genius as reflections of lots of money.

Apologizing for our past sins may reveal character and for a time lessen anti-Americanism abroad, but if it is done without acknowledging that the sins of America are the sins of mankind, and that our remedies are so often exceptional, then it only earns transitory applause—and a more lasting contempt that we ourselves do not believe in the values we profess.

With the demise of the inward-looking, stodgy yeomen, enormous wealth and poverty ensued. The Greek-speaking Hellenistic world could now use the Hellenic genius without ethical constraint.

Athens’s disastrous 415 B.C. expedition against Sicily, the largest democracy in the Greek world, may not prefigure our war in Iraq. (A hypothetical parallel to democratic Athens’s preemptive attack on the neutral, distant, far larger, and equally democratic Syracuse in the midst of an ongoing though dormant war with Sparta would be America’s dropping its struggle with al-Qaeda to invade India).

Few American commentators evaluated MacArthur’s strategic sense at various stages in his generalship in Korea; it was instead the perception of whether he was winning or losing that mattered most to the public.

This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship—replete with ever more rights and responsibilities—would provide superb manpower for growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or language. That idea alone would eventually bring enormous advantages to its armies on the battlefield. (p. 122)

Over many years bin Laden cited dozens of concocted reasons about why he attacked the United States; the only valid one was that he attacked America because he thought—to paraphrase Margaret Atwood—with good reason, he could get away with it.

We forget that even worse choices than those have confronted us in the past—like sending billions of dollars of aid to Joseph Stalin to stop Adolf Hitler, just a few years after the former had slaughtered or starved to death twenty million Soviets, invaded hapless Finland, carved up Poland with Hitler, and sent strategic materials daily to the Third Reich as it firebombed London.

Mexica warriors were predicated on birth and status. In a cyclical pattern of cause and effect, such greater innate advantages gave aristocrats predominance on the battlefield in taking captives, which in turn provided proof of their martial excellence—and

When the successful military action against Saddam Hussein ended in April 2003, more than 70 percent of the American people backed the invasion of Iraq, with politicians and pundits alike elbowing each other aside to take credit for their prescient support.

Harry Truman, after all, in conjunction with Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, radically cut back American arms following the end of the Second World War. Johnson himself wished to dismantle the Marine Corps and felt nuclear weapons had made all such conventional arms unnecessary.

Who we are, how we think, and the manner in which we act, ipsis factis, are considered obnoxious, dangerous, and unpalatable to many fundamentalist Muslims around the globe, who endure manifestations of our power and influence daily, from DVDs in Kabul to text-messaging ads in Yemen.

For years postmodernists have lectured us that there is no truth, no absolutes, no timeless protocols worthy of reverence; Trump is their Nemesis, who reifies their theories that truth is simply a narrative whose veracity is established by the degree of power and persuasion behind it.

For a capitalist system to work, the state had to protect, not regulate or interfere with, free markets. Both for political and religious reasons, this the sultan could not do: The Ottomans had then no idea of the balance of trade. . . . Originated from an age-old tradition in the Middle East, the Ottoman trade policy was that the state had to be concerned above all that the people and craftsmen in the cities in particular would not suffer a shortage of necessities and raw material. Consequently, the imports were always welcomed and encouraged, and exports discouraged.

To assert that military history suggested that wars broke out because bad men, in fear or in pride, sought material advantage or status, or because sometimes good but naive men had done too little to deter them, was understandably seen as antithetical to a more enlightened understanding of human nature.

The United States, being a strong and wealthy society, and with unrivaled global influence, invites envy. The success of its restless culture of freedom, constitutional democracy, self-critique, secular rationalism, and open markets provokes the resentment of both weaker and less-secure theocracy and autocracy alike.

The Price of Neglect A PUBLIC THAT’S illiterate about the conflicts of the past can easily find itself confused during wartime. Without standards of historical comparison, people prove ill-equipped to make informed judgments when the dogs of war are unleashed. Neither U.S. politicians nor most citizens seem to recall the incompetence and terrible decisions that, in December 1777, December 1941, and November 1950, led to massive American casualties and, for a time, public despair.

how does a state manage to achieve, all at once, the highest basket of gas, sales, and income taxes, yet rate nearly dead last in roads and highways, or school performance tests, and have the nation’s greatest number of billionaires, and one-sixth of America’s welfare recipients, and the largest percentage of any state population below the poverty line?

Out of spite, McCain had flipped on his earlier support of Obamacare just to cast the deciding vote that defeated Trump’s effort to repeal and replace it.

Hillary apparently never appreciated that when she went after Trump’s sins of the flesh, it would quickly prove a losing proposition.

officials were losing their jobs over their involvement in real collusion that as of yet lacked a special investigator or counsel.

Only about one in a thousand of DACA’s participants had joined the military.

one can imagine what a candidate Trump would have done with the Wright-Obama connection had he been the 2008 Republican nominee.

Quid dulcius quam habere quicum omnia audeas sic loqui ut tecum?

Sometimes citizens can do as much harm to their commonwealth by violating custom and tradition as by breaking laws.

The larger themes of the new signature progressivism were identity politics, radical environmentalism, and redistributionism.

After September 1939, perhaps one billion of the world’s roughly two billion population were soldiers, partisans, and producers engaged in trying to kill people.

One of the ancient and modern critiques of democracy is that radicals destroy norms for short-term political gain, norms that they themselves often later seek as refuge.

Given the Western ability to produce deadly weapons, its propensity to create cheap, plentiful goods, and its tradition of seeing war in pragmatic rather than ritual terms as a mechanism to advance political ends, it is no surprise that Mesoamericans, African tribes, and native North Americans all joined European forces to help kill off Aztecs, Zulus, and Lakotas.

when we all went to the universities, when we abandoned what made us good & embraced what made us comfortable & secure, we lost something essential, knew we lost it & yet chose to lose.

After fighting for four long years, we were completely surprised by the Soviets’ efforts to absorb Eastern Europe, and their rejection of almost all wartime assurances of elections to come.

America, then, is only as good as the citizens of any era who choose to preserve and to nourish it for one more generation. Republics are so often lost not over centuries but within a single decade.3

It is as if, when unhappy with the opulent present, we look to the impoverished past to blame our unhappiness on the dead, who faced daunting natural obstacles, rather than the living, who so often don’t.

To conclude wars decisively and achieve prewar aims, the victor must defeat, and often even humiliate militarily, an enemy and force the loser to abandon prewar behavior before offering a magnanimous peace. “Humiliate,” here, does not mean to gratuitously insult or ridicule a prostrate enemy but rather to show him that the wages of his unprovoked aggression are the end of his ability to make war on others.

Military history reminds us that those who died on behalf of democratic freedom to stop totalitarian killing were a different sort than totalitarians who died fighting against it to perpetuate killing. The sacrifice of the former meant that generations yet born might have a greater likelihood of opportunity, security, and freedom; the latter fought for a cause that would have increased the suffering of future generations.

Military history is just as often the tangential story of an appeasement that fails to head off warmongering as it is of an aggressive chest-thumping that prompts conflict. The destructive military careers of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler all would have ended earlier had any of their numerous enemies united when the odds favored them, had any listened to a Demosthenes, a Cato the Younger, or a Churchill.

No society in the present age is so self-critical, so ready to embrace foreign ideas, or so transparent and merit-based as the United States. Far more lethal to the U.S. military than a new form of IED would be censorship of ideas back home in the United States, or religious restrictions on research, or politically guided rules of investigation and publication, or government-run monopolies on labor, management, and production.

Yet it is hard to find many wars that have resulted from miscommunications or misunderstandings. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence, or because a prior war ended without a clear resolution or without settling disagreements—in a manner of Rome’s first two wars with Carthage. Again, Margaret Atwood was empirical when she wrote in her poem, “Wars happen because the ones who start them / think they can win.

It may be now blasphemous to concede that much of the current division in the country was deliberately whipped up by Obama. Often in mellifluous tones and with near academic authority, he accentuated racial and cultural differences.

In emblematic fashion, America stands as a protector of the global system of market capitalism and constitutional government, and of the often reckless modernist culture that threatens so much of tribal and indigenous custom and protocols. That we are therefore often to be hated by the authoritarian, the statist, and the tribalist—and periodically to be challenged by those who want to diminish our power, riches, or influence—is regrettable but nevertheless conceded.

One-third of all American residents currently on welfare live in California, as do a quarter of the nation’s illegal aliens—a state where one in four was not born in the United States, but otherwise with just 12 percent of the population.

Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief, that wars are not necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The allied coalition lost few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait during the Gulf War of 1991, yet doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Bill Clinton stopped a Balkan holocaust through air strikes, without sacrificing American soldiers. His supporters argued, with some merit, that the collateral damage from the NATO bombing of Belgrade resulted in far fewer innocents killed, in such a “terrible arithmetic,” than if the Serbian death squads had been allowed to continue their unchecked cleansing of Islamic communities.

agenda. These themes frame the formal plan of this book. The argument covers the three years since Trump announced his presidential bid in July 2015 to mid-2018, as he neared the end of the second year of his presidency. Part 1, the first three chapters

close cooperation with Saudi Arabia against the Shiite Houthis in Yemen. Apparently, Trump figured that to demand cessations of these operations that others had started would call upon him the wrath of hawkish Republicans and fuel charges of isolationism

it was the horror of the two world wars—Verdun, the Somme, Hiroshima—that led to our own era’s questioning of the tragic view of war. Such a reaction was certainly true and understandable in a Europe that nearly destroyed itself in two devastating industrial wars within a roughly twenty-year period. Yet out of such numbing losses we may have missed the lesson of the horror. The calamity of sixty million dead was not just because nationalistic Westerners went to war in an industrial age of weaponry of mass annihilation, but rather because the liberal democracies were unwilling to make moderate sacrifices to keep the peace well before 1914 and 1939—when real resolve could have stopped Prussian militarism, and then Nazism without millions of the blameless perishing.

The clever globe-trotting fox learns many things about the world, the local burrowing hedgehog only one: the essential truth that people are people, and learning how to understand and serve them begins at home with those one sees and speaks with face to face.

The great American contribution to the Red Army was not just food stocks and strategic materials but nearly four hundred thousand heavy transport trucks, which eventually allowed Stalin a mobility and rapidity lacking among his Nazi enemies on the eastern front.

Citizenship, after all, is not an entitlement; it requires work. Yet too many citizens of republics, ancient and modern, come to believe that they deserve rights without assuming responsibilities—and they don’t worry how or why or from whom they inherited their privileges.1

IT IS HARD to think of many democracies that were not born in some manner out of war, violence, or coercion—beginning with the first example of Cleisthenic Athens in 507 B.C., and including our own revolution in 1776. The best examples are those of the twentieth century, when many of the most successful present-day constitutional governments were epiphenomena of war, imposed by the victors or coalition partners, as we have seen in the cases of Germany, Japan, Italy, South Korea, and more recently Grenada, Liberia, Panama, Serbia—and Afghanistan and Iraq.

Greeks and Romans were anti-Mediterranean cultures, in the sense of being at odds with much of the political heritages of Persia, Egypt, and Phoenicia. While Hellenism was influenced—and enriched—at times by Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Persian art, literature, religion, and architecture, its faith in consensual government and free markets was unique. Greek and Latin words for “democracy,” “republic,” “city-state,” “constitution,” “freedom,” “liberty,” and “free speech” have no philological equivalents in other ancient languages of the Mediterranean (and few in the contemporary languages of the non-West as well).

Osama bin Laden did not attack on September 11 because there was a dearth of American diplomats willing to talk with him in the Hindu Kush. He did not think America denied its Muslim citizens the right to worship freely. He did not think his native Saudi Arabia was impoverished or short of lebensraum. Instead, he recognized that a series of Islamic terrorist assaults against U.S. interests over two decades had met with what he would judge as insignificant reprisals. And he therefore concluded, in rather explicit and public fashion, that the supposedly decadent Westerners would never fight, whatever the provocation—

We should note that almost every technological transformation of consequence has taken place under Western auspices—if not Western in the strict geographical sense, then Western in the notion of a cultural landscape shaped by free thought and the chance for profit. Even non-Western innovations, like stirrups and gunpowder, have been quickly modified and improved by Western militaries. Jet fighters, GPS-guided bombs, and laser-guided munitions are all products of Western expertise. Even the jihadists’ most innovative and lethal weapons—improvised explosive devices and suicide belts—are cobbled together from Western-designed explosives and electronics.

Wealthy tech workers in San Francisco hold frequent conferences and symposia about addressing water, sewage, and disease in Africa, but they have demonstrated no ability to address California’s own fetid city streets, which are home to over three hundred thousand homeless and rife with medieval diseases, refuse, excrement, and rodents.

Indeed, future historians may well attribute our recent successes—toppling the two worst regimes in the Middle East, presiding over the birth of consensual governments in their places, and losing fewer soldiers in the effort than during many individual campaigns of the Second World War or Korea—to an ever-innovative American military that learned quickly from mistakes of the kind described in Finding the Target and War Made New. The sometimes dour work of Frederick W. Kagan and Max Boot is itself emblematic of one of our society’s greatest strengths: the capacity to adjust to changing events with the help of thinkers who rely on a more deeply informed sense of historical reality than is conveyed in the panicked conclusions of the twenty-four-hour news cycle.

In a 2017 poll taken by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, most Americans appeared ignorant of the fundamentals of the US Constitution. Thirty-seven percent could not name a single right protected by the First Amendment. Only one out of four Americans could name all three branches of government. One in three could not name any branch of government. In a 2018 survey conducted by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, almost 75 percent of those polled were not able to identify the thirteen original colonies. Over half had no idea whom the United States fought in World War II. Less than 25 percent knew why colonists had fought the Revolutionary War. Twelve percent thought Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded troops in the Civil War.

Physical deprivation and hunger are one thing; the poverty of the mind and psyche is quite another. Crashing Costco to find bulk beans and rice is not the same as flash-mobbing for Air Jordans and iPhones. How odd that our cultural elite and our dependent poor are somewhat alike, in a symbiotic relationship in which the latter guilt-trip the former for entitlements, with the assurance that the top of the pyramid is safe and free to fritter about far from those they worry about. No wonder those in between who lack the romance of the poor and the privileges and power of the elite are shrinking. We are entering the age of the bread-and-circuses Coliseum: luxury box seats for the fleshy senatorial class, free food and tickets for the rest—and the shrinking middle out in the sand of the arena providing the entertainment.

The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, can escape that terrible knowledge. Our freedom is not entirely our own; in some sense it is mortgaged from those who paid the ultimate price for its continuance. My own life of security, freedom, opportunity, and relative affluence certainly has been made possible because a grandfather fought and was gassed in the Argonne; an uncle in the Marines died trying to stop Japanese imperialism on Okinawa; a cousin in the Army lost his life at twenty-two trying to stop Hitler in France; and my father in the Army Air Force flew forty times over Japan hoping to end the idea of the expansive Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. I have spent some time these past decades trying to learn where, how, and why they and their generations fought as they did—and what our own obligations are to acknowledge their sacrifices.

There are three groups of people. There are the rich who are never satisfied because their wealth is never enough for them—these citizens are totally useless for the city. Then there are the poor who, because their daily bread is never enough, are dangerous because they are deceived by the tongues of crooked politicians and by their own envy and so they aim the arrows of their hatred towards the rich. And then, between these two, there is a third. This one is between them. It’s there to keep the order, it’s there to keep the city safe. —EURIPIDES, Suppliants

Islamophobia” as a weapon of jihad The charge of “Islamophobia” is routinely used to shift attention away from jihad terrorists. After a rise in jihadist militancy and the arrest of eight people in Switzerland on suspicion of aiding suicide bombers in Saudi Arabia, some Muslims in Switzerland were in no mood to clean house: “As far as we’re concerned,” said Nadia Karmous, leader of a Muslim women’s group in Switzerland, “there is no rise in Islamism, but rather an increase in Islamophobia.”5 This pattern has recurred in recent years all over the world as “Islamophobia” has passed into the larger lexicon and become a self-perpetuating industry. In Western countries, “Islamophobia” has taken a place beside “racism,” “sexism,” and “homophobia.” The absurdity of all this was well illustrated by a recent incident in Britain: While a crew was filming the harassment of a Muslim for a movie about “Islamophobia,” two passing Brits, who didn’t realize the cameras were rolling, stopped to defend the person being assaulted. Yet neither the filmmakers nor the reporters covering these events seemed to realize that this was evidence that the British were not as violent and xenophobic as the film they were creating suggested.6 Historian Victor Davis Hanson has ably explained the dangerous shift of focus that “Islamophobia” entails: There really isn’t a phenomenon like “Islamophobia”—at least no more than there was a “Germanophobia” in hating Hitler or “Russophobia” in detesting Stalinism. Any unfairness or rudeness that accrues from the “security profiling” of Middle Eastern young males is dwarfed by efforts of Islamic fascists themselves—here in the U.S., in the UK, the Netherlands, France, Turkey, and Israel—to murder Westerners and blow up civilians. The real danger to thousands of innocents is not an occasional evangelical zealot or uncouth politician spouting off about Islam, but the deliberately orchestrated and very sick anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that floods the airways worldwide, emanating from Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, to be sure, but also from our erstwhile “allies” in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.7

It proved almost impossible to square the circle of ensuring crew safety and comfort when trapped in a riveted or welded steel shell of stored gasoline, high-explosive shells and machine gun bullets, sparking engine plugs, and incoming projectiles.

The system rather than the man was what would win the war.

hue, his combed-over

mankind.”21 Hitler also suffered from the symptoms of the autodidact: superficial knowledge without depth or audit, energized by a forceful character dulled by a lack of subtlety. While his armies were stalling in Russia, Hitler’s midday and evening table talk ranged from the quality of honey bees to the best depth of cement for autobahns, always punctuated by conspiratorial interjections of anti-Semitism, contempt for Slavic peoples, crackpot views on art, and obsessions with his own health. Oddly, on some scattered topics—the vulnerability of New York skyscrapers to aerial attacks, the nutritional value of uncooked vegetables, or the eventual popularity of what would become the Volkswagen Bug—Hitler was occasionally strangely prescient.22

Empowerment was again the key: give a citizen equality under the law, freedom, and economic viability, and his talents will bloom and enrich the state at large.4

What is distant is seen as exotic and alluring; what is proximate becomes mundane and ordinary. Saving the world is a much more ambitious, ennobling, and ego-gratifying project than preserving the neighborhood.

Intellectuals and the elite in general are especially prone to the globalist disconnect, most idealistically a concern for global well-being amid local intractable pathologies, most truthfully at worst an end-of-history, megalomaniac impulse to solve innate problems on a grand scale once and for all.

The companions might dress in Persian fashion, and Alexander himself might don the tiara and offer up a Davos-like prayer that all peoples and races under his new-world regime would be equal subjects.

In Kerr’s mind, the toll of 373 deaths due to supposed US government laxity was the moral equivalent of 70 million deaths at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

Had China been a small autocratic country without much financial clout, where the NBA occasionally played a demonstration game, Kerr might well never have spoken out in its defense. The catalyst for his candor was money and hope of more money, not principle.

When ideologues cannot persuade Americans to support their agenda under the existing political rules and traditions of the nation, they seek to alter them for their own advantage—often by redefining citizenship as something never envisioned by the Founders.

In the global media community, “intolerance” does not denote so much China’s mass incarceration of Muslim Uighurs in reeducation camps, or destruction of Tibetan culture, or strangulation of Hong Kong’s democracy, or systemic racism shown African students and resident workers in China. Instead, America’s purported sin is occasional consideration of recalibrating its open-borders policies and requiring legality before entering the country.

In fact, the state was among the nation’s leaders in terms of high taxes, the highest poverty rates, the largest number of welfare residents, both in absolute and relative numbers, the greatest number of homeless people, among the steepest gasoline and electricity prices, the largest number of illegal aliens, the greatest number of outmigrants, among the worst schools and roads, and the greatest ratios of inequality.34 The

army, which was hardly designed to fight imperial German divisions in the trenches of Europe, the Athenian phalanx was never intended to face anything like Spartan hoplites, but was perfectly capable as a seaborne force for putting down recalcitrant tributary allies. In addition, there were reserves of imperial manpower far from Attica that were safe from Spartan ground intrusions—what King Archidamus worried about as the “plenty of the other land” out of his army’s reach.50

Nicholas Monsarrat’s epic postwar novel of the Battle of the Atlantic, The Cruel Sea, is a quite different, nightmarish elemental story of men at sea amid

We should remember that the world wars of the last century likely took more human life than all armed conflicts combined since the dawn of Western civilization twenty-five hundred years prior. And they did so with offensive weapons already obsolete, and all too familiar destructive agendas that persist today, unchanged since antiquity.

...there is no certainty that as scientific progress accelerates and leisure increases, and as the world shrinks on our computer and television screens, there is any corresponding advance in wisdom or morality, much less radical improvement in innate human nature.

Diverse interests are created that view each other as greater enemies than they do foreign threats. Since the common civilizational enemy has been successfully repulsed, it can no longer serve as an effective target for and outlet of people’s sense of superiority, and human psychology generally requires an adversary for the purpose of self-identification, and so a new adversary is crafted: other people in the same civilization. Since this condition of leisure and empowerment, as well as a perception of external threats as non-existential, are the results of a society’s success, success is, ironically, a prerequisite for a society’s self-hatred.46 One

In the end, globalization may not westernize the planet so much as internationalize America.

Unfortunately, the more things change technologically, the more human nature stays the same—a law that applies even to the United States, which often believes it is exempt from the misfortunes of other nations, past and present. This book makes clear, however, that there is no certainty that as scientific progress accelerates and leisure increases, and as the world shrinks on our computer and television screens, there is any corresponding advance in wisdom or morality, much less radical improvement in innate human nature.